# A Pickle for the Knowing Ones

> Timothy Dexter's gloriously eccentric self-published tract, famous for its erratic spelling and absent punctuation, which the author supplied by the page for readers to insert themselves. A one-of-a-kind curiosity from an American original.

Price: 9.00 USD · in stock

## About
Every so often a book comes along that no editor could have produced, and this is the most cheerfully unruly of them all, the work of a self-made eccentric who answered to no rules but his own.What it's aboutWritten by Timothy Dexter, a wealthy and self-mythologizing New England businessman, this famously idiosyncratic little book records his opinions, grievances, and reflections in prose that follows no conventional grammar. It is best known for its wildly inventive spelling and its near-total absence of punctuation. When readers complained, Dexter is said to have added a page of punctuation marks for them to distribute through the text as they pleased. The result is less a treatise than a monument to one man's untutored, unstoppable confidence.ThemesSelf-invention runs through every line, the American conviction that a man might make himself into whatever he declared himself to be. The book is a study in eccentricity, ego, and the strange charisma of someone entirely unbothered by how he appears to others. It is also, unintentionally, a meditation on the conventions of writing itself, which it flouts so completely that they become visible.Why it still mattersDexter's little book has become a beloved curiosity of American letters, endlessly quoted for its punctuation page and its magnificent disregard for spelling. It stands as a reminder that print history is not only the story of polished masterpieces but also of glorious originals who insisted on their own voice. Few books are so genuinely unlike anything else.Who it's forThis is for lovers of literary oddities, collectors of American eccentrica, and anyone who delights in the stubborn, joyful strangeness of a book that refuses to behave.

## Specifications
- author: Timothy Dexter
- publisher: DotBooks
- imprint: DotBooks
- language: en
- binding: Perfect Bound
- pages: 32
- format: paperback